


An Attempt to Salvage a Truly Disastrous Reaction to Aforementioned Kiss.

by AClever_Username



Series: Outside the Ritz [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: (I hope anyway), And was also once in the Scouts, Angst, Aziraphale monologues for a bit, Crowley reads Romance novels, Disaster Crowley, Fluff, Humour, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M, Specifically the Ritz bit, about, but it's okay there's a happy ending, episode 6 related, feelings tm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-23 12:24:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19701322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AClever_Username/pseuds/AClever_Username
Summary: After Aziraphale kissed Crowley, and Crowley promptly panicked, Crowley realises that probably wasn't the best way to leave things. It turns out that he wasn't the only one who wanted things to change after all."It had hit him, approximately five seconds earlier, that he’d just made the biggest fuck-up of his entire existence, (and Crowley had once misplaced the Anti-Christ)."





	An Attempt to Salvage a Truly Disastrous Reaction to Aforementioned Kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> This follows directly on from part 1 so just a warning that it probs won't make an awful lot of sense without it.

To call the sharp U-turn Crowley pulled ‘dangerous’ would be a gross understatement.

“Oh _shit_ oh _buggering hell_ fuck _bollocks_ FUCK! - Crowley what the _hell_ did you do that for you utter _PRICK!”_

He slammed his hands against the steering wheel and weaved through the traffic, pushing his foot down harder on the accelerator. It had hit him, approximately five seconds earlier, that he’d just made the biggest fuck-up of his entire existence, (and Crowley had once _misplaced the Anti-Christ)._ The Bentley flew into a one-way street, travelled the length of it the _wrong_ way, and thundered blind across a junction once it reached the end. Somewhere amongst all this the radio had switched to playing _Crazy Little Thing Called Love,_ but Crowley was too busy cursing himself to even spare the car a disparaging glare.

In the spirit of all those romance novels Crowley sped back to the Ritz, and skidded to a stop atop double yellow lines amidst a chorus of blaring horns and a few Rather Annoyed Tuts. A particular queue gave him the full performance of shaken heads, deep frowns, and obnoxious sighs as he threw open the door. (What people were queuing _for_ exactly was a mystery; in London queues tended to accumulate as a form of natural phenomena).

Said queue of unidentified purpose seemed to take up a disproportionate amount of pavement, and provided a judgemental ring of eyes as Crowley rounded the car and tried to look through them, looking in particular for a cream coat and an absurd tartan bow-tie.

Which was in itself absurd. The bow-tie’s owner was an _angel,_ who had been rather abruptly jilted about twenty minutes ago. Despite what the rom-com’s (which Crowley had NEVER ONCE watched) suggested, there was absolutely _NO WAY_ he’d still-

_“Aziraphale!”_

Aziraphale turned with a jump, his eyes round with surprise, mouth open on a gasp.

“Crowley?”

Crowley shoved his way nearer, leaving a few muttered _thank you then_ ’s and _you’re welcome_ ’s in his wake.

Aziraphale had moved maybe three inches since Crowley had ~~run away~~ strategically exited. Crowley had many questions. He began with what was clearly the most pressing.

“Why’re you still here?”

“You gave me a lift,” said Aziraphale, as if that settled it. Crowley made a face that indicated that it really didn’t.

“- And I, ah, didn’t _particularly_ fancy walking all the way back, and it turns out hailing a taxi is far more difficult than it appears.” Aziraphale gave a half-hearted glare to a black cab that rolled on past.

“…You’re an _angel.”_

Aziraphale looked back at him. He didn’t answer. When he did speak, a few seconds later, it was with a soft-spoken non-sequitur. “Nobody’s paying any attention to your eyes at the moment Crowley,” he said, “and they wouldn’t have if you had arrived five minutes earlier, or perhaps fifteen.” Aziraphale gave Crowley a little close-lipped smile.

In all honesty Crowley had completely forgotten about his eyes, (and not one mention from the queue was to be expected, in any case blatant abuse of double yellows overshadowed any and all other points of interest).

“You waited.”

“You didn’t _quite_ have the reaction I was expecting Crowley,”

“Reaction you were _expecting?!_ What exactly did you think I was gonna do after you-” Crowley stuttered, tripping over his words as he sometimes did, when language just wasn’t big enough or fast enough to express everything he wanted it to. It was one of the times that he wished he was still an angel, and could communicate through a wordless _something,_ that _suggested_ what he wanted to convey more than anything, and was always perfectly understood. Sort of like communication through osmosis.

“Yes?”

“I-” he tried again, “you-”

Aziraphale blinked.

“You kissed me,” he finished.

“Well,” Aziraphale began, “I thought that – since I’m still here, and you’re still here, and the universe is still,” he waved his hands about a little, almost dropping Crowley’s glasses, still in his hand “-universe-ing, I thought it was about time.”

“About time?”

Aziraphale straightened his waistcoat, and threw a glance back towards the Ritz. “I was just thinking about how _nice_ it was that everything had gone back to normal – even the bookshop, and your car – and that we could have lunch together without the apocalypse looming over us again. I’m very glad about that y’know.”

He paused to give Crowley a heartfelt smile of reassurance. It was so very Aziraphale.

“But I - it hit me, Crowley, that we’d normally say goodbye after lunch is over, and I – didn’t want to.” His face had a touch of that look again, the defiant one.

“I’m not exactly the most _modern,_ I’ll be the first to admit. I’m rather…stuck in my ways, as it were. But we’ve spent so much time together during this whole apocalypse thing, and I thought of what it would be like if everything _truly_ went back to the way it was before, and I wouldn’t see you for decades on end. Maybe a hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

“It didn’t feel good, imagining that. I wanted - _want -_ some things to change after all Crowley. And I – I thought I’d let you know.”

This was a lot for Crowley to take in. Aziraphale had gone rather off-script from _Things Crowley Expected Aziraphale To Do._

“And, and you’d thought you’d _‘let me know’_ , by-”

“Kissing you, yes.”

“…Out of interest what happened next, in your mind?”

Aziraphale cocked his head with a little frown. “You gave me a lift back.”

Crowley snorted, a tad hysterically. (Maybe a little more than a tad. A smidge. A wee bit. Entirely).

“Oh, right, yeah, obviously,”

“Yes I thought so.”

Crowley rubbed his hands over his face. “This is ridiculous.”

Aziraphale’s face, always so expressive, crumbled in hurt as he flinched. “It...it is?”

“No! No I didn’t mean-” Crowley hissed through his teeth. Conversations with Aziraphale sometimes started to slip through his fingers very rapidly, and usually ended with one of them dramatically storming off. King James’ Park. The bandstand.

“What I _meant_ was that you expected me to get all that from a – from a kiss. From you kissing me.”

“Did you not want me to?”

Crowley looked at him. It was such a genuine question. “Of _course_ I wanted you to,” he murmured. “I just never thought you actually _would.”_

Crowley swallowed. _“You go too fast for me, Crowley”_ he whispered, words he’d tried to make peace with time and time again.

“Ah.”

Aziraphale shifted uncomfortably, smoothing a hand down the buttons of his waistcoat. “Yes.”

“Yeah.”

The glasses – _Crowley’s glasses –_ in Aziraphale’s hands were folded, and tucked neatly away in one of his pockets. Aziraphale clasped his hands, and set his shoulders, lips pressed in a thin line.

Crowley waited for him. He’d waited this long already, after all.

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale said simply. “I was a coward before.”

“No-”

“Yes, Crowley. I was.”

At that precise moment someone asked if they were in the queue. They weren’t. They moved farther down the pavement, and checked back over their shoulders with the lady that had asked. She gave them a glare. They moved a few more paces back. They lady turned around, satisfied.

They’d settled somewhere a little quieter, up against one of the flower boxes that lined the window sill. They were also much closer than they were previously. There were perhaps two flowers between them. (Maybe three if you counted the rather squished one with only half its petals remaining).

“As I was saying,” Aziraphale began again, “I was a coward when I said that. I was a coward for a long time before that. _You_ never resisted being friends Crowley – that was always me.”

“Yeah but – I know you. There was heaven and-”

“You and I both know I’ve never _really_ cared for heaven and the ‘ _Great Plan’_ and whatnot. Or for their enquiries concerning the whereabouts of a particular flaming sword for that matter.”

Crowley couldn’t help but smile at that, like he had the first time.

“They were just excuses Crowley. And, and then you went and saved my books, and I clung to them even harder. And _then_ I couldn’t see you get hurt over Holy Water so I gave it to you, and I’d just given you the deadliest tea flask in the world so that I wouldn’t lose you through a church robbery gone wrong, and I was… _afraid._ When you asked me for that lift, I didn’t want to risk losing your friendship – whether through divine intervention or otherwise – by changing the way things were anymore than I already had. So I panicked.”

Aziraphale took a deep breath. He was staring somewhere near Crowley’s shoes, head bowed just enough that Crowley could see that he’d managed to get a leaf stuck in his curls somewhere along the line.

“The whole ‘world ending’ really put things into perspective,” Aziraphale said quietly. He looked back up at Crowley. “You were right all along Crowley – we’re on our own side, always have been. I hope you can forgive me for taking so long to realise it.”

He had such a strange mix of emotions on his face; somehow both forlorn and hopeful, a certain sadness in the creases of his brow but a calm acceptance in his eyes.

“’Course I forgive you,” Crowley said softly, because how could he say anything else? “I er, I know something about panicking myself,” he finished, rubbing the back of his neck and resolutely ignoring the events of about half an hour ago.

“Really?” Aziraphale asked.

“Yeah, I mean – it’s not entirely all your fault is it? Neither of us are particularly good at-” he waved his hand between them, “- talking and…stuff. Y’know? We just kinda – I save you from decapitation, _you_ take me for crepes, I stop you from being blown to oblivion, _you_ give me Holy Water. Neither of us were ever that willing to say the, uh - the ‘four letter word’ so to speak,”

“You hate it when I call you ‘nice’,” Aziraphale said, with the barest ducking of his head, adding just another instance, another metaphor to the list of all the ways they said _I love you._

Crowley caught it. He smiled wide enough to make his eyes burn. (Quite an achievement, considering he didn’t even really need to blink).

“So,” Crowley said, after a few moments of just staring at each other, and listening to the Bentley getting clamped in the background. “Just to – just to clarify: you really do… _like_ me, and not just as a friend,”

“Oh I think it’s fair to say I like you _quite a bit more_ than as a friend my dear.”

None of the fantasies Crowley had ever conjured up came close to what it was like to hear it, spilling from Aziraphale’s lips. If there was a way to _feel_ incandescent, then Crowley was achieving it. He’d _been_ to heaven and it was stone-cold in comparison. He was even filled with the urge to be kind to his plants – even the slightly wilted one, _especially_ the slightly wilted one. Crowley struggled to pinpoint all those things the novels had said he’d feel, but words like ‘joy’ just weren’t enough.

Perhaps what Crowley felt was simply ineffable.

He cleared his throat. “It would have been nice to know all this before you ambushed me,”

“I did not _ambush_ anybody – I was just caught up in the spirit of the moment,” Aziraphale said, and the bashful fluttering of his eyes was back, that little pleased smile.

The scene was exactly as it was just a short while ago, only with one fundamental difference – they were both on the same page, and to Crowley’s relief, this particular page wasn’t in a book about unrequited love. Where it did happen to be was in a book about a fast-living demon and a somewhat fussy angel, who had somehow averted the apocalypse and went to the Ritz to celebrate, then shared a kiss under the cover of the great concrete arches. (Their page in the second volume of Agnes Nutter’s Nice and Accurate Prophecies, ( _Further Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Concerning the World that Is To Come: The Saga Continues,_ definitively burned to a crisp) contained not one kiss but two).

“Angel,” Crowley said, “is there any chance of another kiss?”

Aziraphale all but glowed. “Now you promise you won’t run off,”

“Scout’s honour,” Crowley replied, and Aziraphale nodded, satisfied. (They both took ‘Scout’s honour’ very seriously, on account of the fact that Crowley had once been causing some minor mischief - (or for the Scouts, whose camping trip of knot tying had just been turned into a high stakes assault course - (the leaders having a _nightmare_ of a time phoning all the mums and dad’s for every plaster on every knee) - a minor miracle) - and had stuck around, gaining a tiny purple badge and ugly neckerchief with the sole purpose in mind of negating any possible rebuttals along the lines of _‘but you weren’t in the scouts’_. In other words Crowley had once joined the Scouts to be petty).

This time it was Crowley who leaned in, and touched his lips to Aziraphale’s. Aziraphale made one of his little happy noises as he did so. Some may have sworn Crowley made a similar noise, but those would have found that pens – when on the phone and in need of one _quite urgently_ , the man from BT already reciting his phone number down the other end – were unavailable to them, not even a free pencil from Ikea to be found.

On the windowsill between them, one particularly squished flower, half its petals missing, suddenly sprung into full bloom.

**Author's Note:**

> So here's part 2 :) 
> 
> I really loved writing these lads so if any y'all would be interested in reading more let me know or smth?? (Kudos and comments are ALWAYS v much appreciated :)).
> 
> Also yis I did nick the "fast-living demon and a somewhat fussy angel" from the blurb on the book. I just though that summed them up quite well.
> 
> Mistakes are all mine etc and thanks for reading.


End file.
